After hours of outage, Facebook Inc’s products Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are now back online.
However, founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has reportedly fallen, having been reduced by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people.
The drastic reduction in his net worth was largely due to a revelation by a whistleblower and also outages that affected Facebook Inc.’s flagship products.
The flagship products include Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
According to a report by Yahoo Finance, a selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.
On September 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products-such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots-while downplaying the issues in public.
The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.
In an explosive 60 Minutes interview that aired in the United States, Sunday, data scientist Frances Haugen, a former employee in Facebook’s civic integrity unit, revealed that she was the source of the internal documents and research showing the company knew of the harmful effects caused by its platforms.